Saturday, December 14, 2019

On the Jakarta Airport Train

Greetings from the Jakarta airport train ("Railink") to Soekarno–Hatta International Airport. I took the train from Yogyakarta after the IEEE TALE 2019 engineering education conference, then one stop on a crowded commuter train to transfer to the airport express at Manggarai. The only difficulty was that the station is being rebuilt, so to get from the old commuter platform to the shiny new airport one, I had to balance along the edge of the platform, with busy commuters coming the other way, then walk cross the tracks. I then went up an escalator into a different world of space, and helpful staff. The train appears to have more staff than passengers, the conductor explaining Friday is the peak time. Also the warned me that at Duri the train changes direction. One improvement would be to have the train display the next destination: currently the display tells you the temperature and the speed of the train, which are not as important as where to get off.

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